Certain Event Automation Software vs. Cvent Onsite Solutions

Certain is great for easy-to-use registration sites. It collects all information and user can upload reports easily. It's great to copy the event if you are doing an annual one where the information doesn't drastically change. I love being able to create the link in under an hour and send it out to all attendees. I can also send one large email out to all participants

Incentivized

As mentioned in the first question, I think CVENT Onsite is best to use when the group is over 400 people. Anything under that we can manage by pre-printing. But when it's over 400 and you have a quick registration timeline, onsite solutions are your only option (in my opinion).

Incentivized

• Easy to use and create
• Easy to pull reports once event has been sent to attendees
• Great way to gather a lot of information

Incentivized

• Allows a quick check-in process in the app rather than dealing with pesky paper badges
• Provides a digital itinerary for attendees rather than having to print them out individually
• Offers attendee tracking to better tailor future events

Incentivized

• Dashboards: It's quite important for leadership to get a visual of what their event registrants look like (with graphs, for example). Now, Certain does not present a feature to create dashboards, so we have to export their reports and create our dashboards ourselves.
• UX when setting up an event: Now this can be quite complex, as it's not as easy to use or intuitive. Many different tabs with many different sub-items can present a confusing experience for newcomers when building an event.

Incentivized

• Pricing. If we can get lower pricing, we can use for more events.
• Buying our own on-site kits vs having Cvent team needing to be onsite.

Incentivized

Cvent Onsite Solutions is very user friendly and easy for those who are not very tech savvy. My first time using On-Arrival went very smoothly while onsite for a program due to the prior training that was provided by Cvent Onsite Solutions in our OSS training. Overall, it allows for tech integrations to be utilized easily.

The person onsite can be hit or miss. We have had a few really wonderful support technicians that came prepared, were helpful, and jumped in where needed. We have had others that sat back, didn't offer advice or best practices tips, and were not pleasant to work with. It's very hit or miss.

Incentivized

Sympla or Eventbrite are great for smaller events that don't require a lot of information from your audience or extensive communication from your event owner. They are better suited for those events, since they are easy and quick to set up. Certain comes in for your tradeshows or recurring events, since it presents a calendar view of your field marketing events, as well as full form customization, automation of email sequences, reporting, etc. It's more complex to use, so you might as well hand it over to people who are well used to setting up events.

Incentivized

My organization also uses the Cvent Event Management platform. We did try using another platform called "STAR" which had very limited offerings compared to the Cvent Onsite Solutions. STAR did not have a user-friendly layout nor was it easy to digitally manage our events. Maybe the STAR platform works better on a smaller scale, but we are a large organization so it simply wasn't efficient for us

Incentivized

• Certain helps to deliver a great customer experience, since it facilitates automatic email delivery and your company can keep them connected well before or well after an event.
• Certain presents a wide variety of reports, which perfectly addresses any request for visibility coming from your organization.
• Certain's configuration settings are quite complex, so our newcomers are not comfortable using the software at first.
• In case you need a more visual representation of your audience, Certain, unfortunately, does not generate dashboards.

Incentivized

• It allows our organization to lower overtime pay to employees who needed to stay at the registration area
• Allows us to allocate our resources to other functions that bring in revenue
• Pre-conference time usually wasted on pre-packing is now freed up to focus on more important functions within our organization

Incentivized